For many, the festive season is synonymous with the drinking season. But this is not the reason why we advise you to choose your drinking buddy wisely.
It’s a buyer’s market. Over the years, the customer has grown in stature and in exigency. This has major repercussions for the way vendors sell products and services. Timing is of the essence, both to the CIO taking the decision, and to the service providers assisting the customer in his buying journey.
Solution selling has been the motto for quite some time already. To use a more recent term: Design Thinking. Rather than pushing products or services, the trend is to see things from the customer’s perspective. Having a design mindset means you are focusing on the solution and the actions that need to be taken, not on the problem in itself. Experience shows that companies working in that spirit, see a better success rate for innovations. Design thinking is the new architecture. This user-centric approach is the way forward for companies that are truly customer-focused.
Pay-as-you-drink
Taking it a step further, is the concept the World Economic Forum calls the ‘outcome economy’. In this concept, companies are no longer competing on the price of products and services, but are basing their pricing on the measurable results that are being delivered. Thanks to the digital revolution, everything can be measured and quantified. And vendors can be measured and paid based on the business value they are delivering. More and more enterprises are tapping into the cloud for compute power and data storage.
Cloud influences technology decision cycle
The numbers prove that this evolution is unstoppable. According to market researcher IDC, the cloud-related share of total EMEA infrastructure expenditure on server, disk storage and Ethernet switch now represents more than 25.1%, and this percentage is continuing to increase.
The changing consumption model has an impact on the decision cycle and the value discussion between business and IT. All too often, business-IT conversation focuses on the consumption model very early on in the dialogue, which is not necessarily a good thing. One of the first steps that needs to be debated is the architecture of a Modern Datacenter. The way it is implemented, on-premise or off-premise, is a matter that can only be resolved once a stable architecture is designed and the technological choices have been made.
Creating a win-win
IT architecture, technology choices and consumption models are topics that require thorough thinking, and this is where service providers can demonstrate their true expertise. A CIO that focuses on being a broker of IT-services to best support Line-of-Businesses will seek help here from an experienced service provider that has in-depth knowledge of both on- and off-premise advantages and disadvantages and will combine business acumen with technological savvy. The ideal partner will relieve the IT organization of all this complexity, letting the CIO spend more time on business strategy, innovation and making a difference in – what are – transformational times.
Engaging a service provider early on in the decision-making process is mutually beneficial to both the IT organization and the service provider. It takes two to tango, and by co-creating the architecture with an external partner, the CIO can rest assured that his environment will be less risk-prone. For his part, the service provider gets the chance to offer a broader set of solutions. Allowing everyone to win, is what true partnerships are all about.
